Add Custom Facebook Apps to Your Business Page

Organizing and adding a few custom apps to your business’s Facebook Page can help your customers and make your page more appealing. Here’s a quick overview.

Right below the Cover photo are four featured apps. One of them is Photos, which is a Facebook app; because it’s a Facebook app, you can’t move it, hide it, or change the hyperlinked text. The latest photo you’ve uploaded or tagged with the Page name is what shows up in this box.

The next three spaces are available to place custom apps. In fact, there are 12 more spaces for custom apps (more on that in a moment), but only a total of four apps show in this featured space. You’ll be able to edit and modify the hyperlinked text and the image on the app box and be able to change their order.

Depending on your business, the type of apps you set here can be different, but these are the three main types most businesses use:

Email Capture with a Free Gift: If you already use an e-mail list service, check to see whether it has a Facebook integration you can use for this app box. If not, you can always grab the HTML code for your sign-up form and place it in this space, using Heyo’s HTML app or an HTML app from any other third party (Involver, WooBox, and so on).

Event Announcement: If you have an event coming up, you don’t have to use the Facebook Event app; you can create a nice Page for your event by using any third-party app that allows you to add an image or HTML code.

Sales Page: If your sales Page is 850 pixels wide or less, you can use Heyo’s iFrame app to pull the whole web page into Facebook. Almost every third-party app company has a system that pulls in a website and places it on an app Page in Facebook. Here’s a great example of how that can look: http://bit.ly/GoodExample.

Here is a Page that uses custom apps; one features a sales page (Watch!); another gathers e-mail addresses in exchange for a free gift (Sign Up!); and the third tells about an upcoming event (Online Class).

Currently, people can see custom apps only when they view your Page on a computer. The mobile view of a business Page through the Facebook app doesn’t show any custom apps. Also, if you create a post with a link to a custom app, and someone taps that link on a mobile app, he or she is just redirected back to the Page’s Timeline or taken to the browser interface.

Hopefully this will change in the future, as many custom apps are important to a business on Facebook.